On the SitePoint PHP blog they've continued their series covering the SparkPost mail delivery service and integrating it in to your application. In this latest part of the series author Christopher Pitt starts looking at the SparkPost API and uses it as a chance to practice some TDD (Test Driven Development) skills.

In a previous post, we looked at SparkPost (as an alternative to Mandrill), and explored a bit of the official PHP client. The official client handles a decent amount of work, but I got to thinking about what it would take to build a new client.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I could learn about the SparkPost API, and practice Test Driven Development at the same time. So, in this post we’ll look to do just that!

He uses a few different libraries to explore the API and its endpoints: Guzzle for the HTTP requests and the Mockery+PHPUnit combination for the testing. He includes the setup and configuration for the testing environment and some sample tests for making sure things are connected. He then integrates Mockery into the testing, using it to mock the Guzzle requests and still have the tests pass even without the actual connection. He then works through several other tests and finishes the post with a mention of building coverage results for the "Client" class.